Just as the names are etched onto the granite, the years are etched onto the faces of the men who have engineered the remembrance.

"This is our life’s work," said Lincoln Peters, 73, a retired draftsman whose right leg still bears the marks of the Japanese bullet that pierced it more than 50 years ago. "We really put everything into this. We are a proud people."

It also is a small group of people whose war exploits are little known outside the community. In fact, the community-with no country to call home, its original empire swallowed into what is today Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey-is little known itself.

So the old men facing their own mortality say the blocks of stone are perhaps the final watermark of a group that has tumbled through the ages from the height of ancient power to a close-knit but now ebbing culture in a polyglot city years and miles away.

"We want people to see this," said Cyrus Alexander, 70, an attorney who served in the Army. "In 20 years we'll be gone, and then what will there be?"

The war memorial, at 2905 N. Thatcher Ave., embodies the declining presence, even down to its location in the midst of a graveyard.

"It's end-of-the-line Charlie," 78-year-old war hero Eddie Joseph said, employing a phrase he picked up during World War II, his eyes turning liquid. "I mean, this is it."

Marshall Joseph, 79, a retired accountant who served in the Pacific, said, "We've broke our hearts on this."

On a cold day a few weeks ago, lit by a blast of sunlight, Peters slowed his sedan as it wound through Elmwood Cemetery, past the tombstones with names like "Tamraz," inscribed in Aramaic.

The cemetery is a popular resting place for the Assyrian community. The small patch of land that is berth to the monument was part of a larger plot once owned by the Assyrian Church in Chicago, intended to be used by its poor too proud to be buried with nameless paupers. Pride always seems to have played a central role for the Assyrians here.

"In 1918, they had their own National Guard battalion. They seemed to have really been into it, from the beginning of the community," said Daniel Wolk, a doctoral candidate in anthropolgy at the University of Chicago who has studied the Assyrian presence here. "They became Americans by being very patriotic ... by being in the military."

Eddie Joseph, for instance, flew in the flghter planes in World War 11 and the Korean and Vietnam conflicts, retiring as a colonel.

Tribune photo by Charles Osgood

Saul Joseph, 77, was written up in the local papers after he was awarded the Silver Star for valor in battle against the Germans in France.

"A guy froze up. I took the machine gun myself and started blastin' away," he said, although he was eventually cut down himself by shrapnel from an anti-tank shell. "I was hit six places."

The men, interviewed around a table at a diner near the cemetery, say it's been in their tradition to be warriors as well as scholars.

A Semitic people, the original militaristic kingdoms of Assyria asserted themselves in the Middle East during the second millennium B.C. They began a new period of expansion in the 9th Century B.C. based around their capital Nineveh, and were destroyed by a coalition army in the 6th Century B.C.

Today mainly Christians who claim St. Peter as their first patriarch, Assyrians have existed ethnic minorities within several empires since. They have ha Significant presence in the Chicago area since the early 1900s.

During World War I, Assyrians fleeing genocide and famine w settling mainly in Near No Side neighborhoods. The group-which was made up many tradesmen initially, but n has achieved greater affluence-gradually spread fart north and is now concentrated West Rogers Park and the no

Census figures from 1990 show about 8,000 first-generation Assyrians in Chicago and 12,500 in t metropolitan area. The group about 72,000 members total in t region, according to estimates from the Illinois Ethnic Coalition It is mainly from this community that a committee-officially called the Assyrian-American Amvet Post #5--raised $40,000 the monument by soliciting do tions and selling a book with t names of veterans.

When Peters' car finally came a halt in front of the memorial--the slabs glistening, nine miniature flags flying--he quietly pointed and told a story about o of its names.

"That name there is Albert Peters. He was my cousin, but was more than that. When mother died, his mother took to live with him," he said. " he got drafted, I joined the Army just to be with him. He was k in Italy in World War II, a months after we went in. We had a deal that whoever had a son would name him after the other one. So, I named my boy Albert."

Such a strong connection exists for all the men-even those of different ethnicity.

"I damn near grew up w these guys. Every name on there is a personal friend," said Albert Miglioratti, 75, an Italian-American who married an Assyrian- American.

The initial effort to construct the monument, begun in 1992, spearheaded by John Hosanna quiet, religious man who was ever seeking ways to preserve community's identity, one that was becoming diluted through intermarriage and assimilation.

"John's goal was to make s that people remembered," Marshall Joseph said.

Hosanna died Oct. 18 of 1 year at age 87, less than month before the granite slabs were set in the ground.

"He would ask about that monument when he was in the hospital," Peters said. "We would him that it was coming al really good."

The monument will be officially dedicated May 16, with a formal dinner banquet May 17. Anyone wishing to attend should call shall Joseph at 773-821-7001.